10 - Signalling Intent: Beacons, Lookouts and Military Communications

Summary

And then towards midwinter they took themselves to their prepared depots, out through Hampshire into Berkshire at Reading; and they did, in their custom, ignite their beacons as they travelled; and travelled then to Wallingford and scorched it all up, and then turned along Ashdown to Cwichelm's Barrow, and there awaited the boasted threats, because it had often been said that if they sought out Cwichelm's Barrow they would never get to the sea.

Introduction

Beacons and lookouts played a key role in the networks of local and regional communications of Anglo-Saxon England during the Viking Age (ninth to eleventh centuries). While the large fortified centres of the period are well-known, the nature of interconnections between them and smaller-scale local arrangements has only recently received attention. Written evidence, place names and landscape archaeology together allow for the reconstruction of elements of signalling and sighting systems. This contribution presents the historical evidence for beacons, discusses the context within which beacons and lookouts developed and draws upon a series of case studies to reveal local systems of communication in the landscape of Anglo-Saxon England.

Beacons and lookouts in written sources

On the face of it, evidence for the use of beacons in Anglo-Saxon England may appear meagre, but David Hill and Sheila Sharp have argued convincingly that it reflects a much wider employment of this type of signalling. Their seminal article on the topic drew together the various strands of documentary evidence in order to provide a firm basis for what they described as a ‘commonplace’ assumption that a beacon system was used by the West Saxons in their wars against the Vikings. As they showed, direct documentary evidence for the maintenance of lookout posts in Anglo-Saxon England is limited to the early eleventhcentury Rectitudines singularum personarum, which lists saweard or ‘sea watch’ as a duty both of thegns and of cottars, and a Cornish charter of the late tenth century that includes uigiliis marinis as one of the obligations from which the land was not exempt. Indirectly, however, the famous description of the watchman of the Scyldingas in Beowulf may reflect early medieval practice in England…